The Heart of the Matter
by rahleeyah
Summary: Set early s5. When someone from Jean's past returns to Ballarat, it turns the Blake house upside down. Lucien discovers there's more to Jean's past than he ever knew, and Jean struggles to find her way.
1. Chapter 1

She was waiting for him in the kitchen, his beautiful love, standing with her back towards him, gazing out through the window to the garden beyond. The day had been a long and trying one, and there was nothing Lucien wanted more in this moment than _her_, his darling Jean, in his arms, safe and well. Murder and mayhem and mystery often followed him home, but on this particular day he had left work at work, had neatly tied up the case at hand and now could rest, warm and content, with Jean.

Matthew had come home perhaps an hour or so before, but there was no sign of him in the kitchen or the sitting room, and so Lucien decided to throw caution to the wind. The Superintendent was a smart man, after all, and he knew the possible pitfalls of sharing a house with an engaged couple and how to avoid them quite well by now. Grinning, then, Lucien crossed the kitchen with quick, quiet steps, his gaze trained on the elegant slope of Jean's back, the artful tumble of her soft, dark curls.

If she heard him approach she gave no sign, and so Lucien stuck at once, sliding his arm around her waist from behind while his lips descended on the curve of her neck. It had been in his mind to whisper, _hello, my darling, _but he never got the chance, for he had no sooner touched her than she let out a shriek and spun around, pushing him away forcefully.

What he saw then made his heart freeze in his chest; it was not Jean at all! How could he have been so blind? This woman was of a height with Jean, and dressed in rather the same fashion she ordinarily chose - silky blouse neatly tucked into a tight, knee-length skirt - and her hair was the same dark, shiny brown, even her curls were the same, but this woman was a stranger to him. Her face - and, to be frank, her body - was quite a bit more round than Jean's and her eyes were a deep, dark brown, not Jean's sparkling blue. The hair at her temples was untouched by grey, and there were no laugh lines at the corner of her thin mouth.

"Oh, I do beg your pardon," Lucien said quickly, having snatched his hands away and taken several steps back from her.

For a moment the woman stared at him, and Lucien held his breath, terrified that she might begin to shriek, or strike him, or call for the police, but then to his surprise she let forth a great, booming laugh that was not at all like Jean's.

"You must be Lucien Blake, then," the woman said. "Tell me, do you always greet your housekeeper this way?"

Lucien stared at her, confused and somewhat shamefaced; the engagement was still a secret while his divorce was pending, and he had no earthly idea who this woman might be, what she was doing standing all alone in his kitchen. How had she come to be here? What did she want from him? And what the bloody hell was he supposed to say to her? Though he was not particularly concerned with the matter of his own reputation _Jean's _good name was very dear to him indeed, and he did not want to risk it by saying the wrong thing to this stranger now; but what then _could _he say?

The sound of the front door opening interrupted his racing thoughts, gave him a moment to collect himself before he spoke. The woman heard it, too, cocked her head to the side like a predator having just caught wind of its evening meal.

"Lucien?" he heard Jean call.

"In here!" he answered. Ordinarily he would have added a _darling_ to that short exclamation, but he bit his tongue, still staring warily at the stranger in his kitchen. The woman did not seem particularly troubled; she was grinning at him, tightly, and he did not entirely trust the mischievous expression in her eyes.

"I've bought us a roast," Jean said to him as she approached, "it will be a while before it's - oh."

Jean had come dancing into the kitchen, a basket of shopping held gracefully in one hand, but she swayed to a stop as she took in the scene before her, her gaze locking at once on the stranger who stood with Lucien. There was no fear in Jean's face, no concern; she recognized this woman, and she did not appear entirely happy about that fact.

"Eadie?" she said, surprised, a hundred unspoken questions hanging in that one single word.

"It's good to see you, too, Jeannie," the woman said, still grinning. "I was just getting acquainted with your man here." The woman - _Eadie - _threw him an outrageous wink, and Jean sighed, her shoulders drooping as if in defeat, and Luicen watched it all, utterly confused and uncomprehending. There was something heavy, tense in the air, as if they were old enemies or old friends, reunited and yet not trusting one another; Lucien could feel it, could feel the way each woman seemed to be maneuvering herself as if they were about to being some incomprehensible game of chess.

"Lucien," Jean said then, gathering herself and crossing the kitchen to place her basket on the counter, "this is my sister, Eadie Parks. Eadie, this is Lucien Blake."

"We've met," Eadie said slyly.

"Parks?" Lucien asked as the truth slowly dawned on him. "You wouldn't be Danny's mother, would you?"

"The very same," Eadie told him.

He had been wondering about this woman for years now; Danny had lived with his mother while he worked for the Ballarat police, but he had spent more time in Lucien's home than hers. The lad had occasionally remarked on his mother, had on his few visits since his move to Melbourne said more than once _well, I'm off, I've got to see mum before I go back, _but Lucien had never heard her proper name, and he had never met her. In fact, he realized, growing more concerned by the second, Jean had never mentioned her sister to him at all. He knew nothing about this woman, and he found himself terribly curious. This woman, standing in his kitchen, had known Jean from her earliest days, had probably known her better than Lucien himself, and he thought the idea of sitting down with her and hearing stories from Jean's girlhood terribly charming.

"He's a fine lad," Lucien told her earnestly.

Eadie grinned at him, delighted, but then it occurred to him that while he and Eadie both seemed at ease with one another Jean's expression was almost grim, and her posture was really quite tense. It might be that Eadie meant no harm at all, but Jean had not let her guard down, and it was Jean he loved. Perhaps the right thing for him to do, as a doting fiance, would be to reach out to her, take her hand and pull her close and try to soothe whatever ailed her, but he did not know whether Jean had told her sister about the engagement, and he wanted to leave the matter up to her, did not want to force her to reveal any truth she was not willing to confess just yet.

"What can I do for you, Eadie?" Jean asked. Her tone was clipped, professional, almost as if she were speaking to a new patient in the surgery, and not her own flesh and blood. Lucien frowned; _something is wrong here_, he thought. Something was very wrong indeed.

"I know you've got better things to do than stand around talking to the likes of me," Eadie said, and though her tone was light her words carried with them a bite of hostility Lucien cared for not at all. "But I thought you ought to know."

"Ought to know what?" Jean's tone was just this side of frustrated, a little furrow forming between her brows.

"Tucker's coming home." The words were delivered quickly, cleanly, as if they carried no more weight than a remark upon the weather, but Eadie's gaze was intense as she stared at her sister, and Jean drew in a sharp breath, reaching out to the counter to steady herself as if she had just been dealt a crushing blow.

_What on earth, _Lucien thought, but there was no time for him to interject himself into the conversation; the sisters appeared to have forgotten him entirely.

"What?" Jean demanded, her voice sharp, almost desperate.

"They've found him, Jeannie. They're bringing him home." Once more Eadie's posture reminded Lucien of some great jungle cat, poised to strike; if she were a tiger, he thought, her tail would be twitching as she prepared herself to pounce.

"They've found his body?" Jean's voice was soft, and sad, her face ravaged as if by grief, and Lucien could not understand any part of the scene playing out before him. _Who the bloody hell is Tucker? _he wondered.

Eadie laughed, but it was not a happy sound. "No. They've found _him. _Apparently he was a prisoner of war in Korea or somewhere. He escaped. They said he went native, that's why no one's heard from him for all these years. But about a month ago he just walked up to some consulate somewhere and asked to come home."

There was silence for a long moment as Jean digested these words; she raised her right hand and pressed her fingertips against her lips, and even from a distance Lucien could see that she was shaking. _What on earth? _He wondered, watching as she closed her eyes, tried and failed to pull herself together. A quiet gasp escaped her like the sound of a sob cut short, and then she made her way to the kitchen table, collapsing into the nearest chair.

"How did you find out about this?" she asked in a trembling voice. There were tears in the corners of her eyes, and she had never seemed so much a stranger to Lucien as she did in that moment.

"Bugsy told me," Eadie said with a shrug. "He would have told you, too, only you haven't given the man the time of day since-"

"Eadie-" Jean's voice was almost strangled, her eyes wide and pleading.

"I'm just saying, you wouldn't have to hear everything secondhand from me if you hadn't got so up yourself-"

"I beg your pardon-" Lucien did try to interrupt, then, outraged at the bitter accusation and determined to defend the woman he loved, but Eadie bore in mercilessly.

"You're too good for the rest of us now, have been since you moved into this big house and started walking around like you own the whole city but you can't change facts. We're your family, Jeannie. We haven't forgotten that, even if you have."

It was a nasty little speech, delivered artfully and with great relish, as if Eadie had been mulling over those words for years now and was delighted to have the opportunity to give them voice at last. His gaze bounced back and forth between the pair of them, this woman he loved more than his own life and the woman who represented everything he'd never known about her. Jean made no attempt to defend herself, simply sat, still shaking, staring at her sister, tears coursing silently down her cheeks.

"Tucker's coming home today. He's going to stay with Laurie. We decided we'd let him get some rest, and then go see him tomorrow. Me and Bugsy and the kids will be going over at lunchtime. You're welcome to join us. If you aren't too busy."

And with that Eadie marched smartly from the room, pausing at the doorway to throw a casual, "nice to meet you, _Lucien,_" over her shoulder before making her way out of the house.

The silence that settled over Lucien and Jean in her wake was a heavy, roiling thing, a storm brewing right there in the kitchen, and though the sun was shining brightly beyond the windows Lucien fancied he could almost hear the rumble of thunder. His mind was swirling with questions, his heart aching, guilt and fear warring with one another inside him. How could it be, he wondered, that he could know so little of Jean's family? Who were these people - _Tucker, Bugsy, Laurie, the kids - _who seemed to know her, and yet whose names she'd never spoken? What horror waited for Jean, come tomorrow? And why was she still weeping, shaking, overcome and overwrought by the news her sister had just dropped in her lap?

"Jean-" Lucien started to say, started to approach her, reaching out as if to touch her shoulder, but Jean vaulted from the chair, shaking her head.

"No, Lucien," she said. "I just...I need..._no."_ And then she, too, turned and left him, the soft sound of her weeping floating on the air behind her as she abandoned him and made her way up the stairs to her room alone.

* * *

"So you met Eadie, then," Matthew said grimly when he discovered Lucien brooding in the sitting room some time later. Jean had yet to put in an appearance, and their dinner was forgotten in the refrigerator.

"Yes," Lucien grumbled. "Is she always like that?"

"Sharp-tongued and looking for trouble?"

"Yes."

"Yes." Matthew settled himself down into the armchair, stretching out his leg and propping his cane up beside him. "She's always been a gossip, and she's always been one to hold a grudge."

"You know her well, then?" Lucien regarded Matthew curiously. It had never occurred to him to wonder, before now, how well Matthew had known Jean before Lucien came home. In the beginning he had not paid much attention to anything or anyone around him, and by the time Matthew had become his friend, by the time Jean had become so dear to him, he had almost taken it for granted that they got on well. But they must have known one another, he realized; Jean was quite a bit younger than Matthew and himself, but she had been his father's housekeeper and his father had worked closely with Matthew, and Ballarat was not such a very big place.

"I knew her husband. Eadie's younger than Jean but Richie was only a year or two behind me in school. We used to play footie together."

"You say you knew him. What happened to him?"

"No one knows," Matthew said. There was a foggy, distant look in his eyes, and Lucien hated to see it, hated to think that there were things Matthew knew about Jean, about her past, that Lucien had yet to learn himself. "He went interstate when Danny was a lad, no one's seen hide nor hair of him since. Eadie told anyone who would listen that there must have been an accident with the car, but I reckon he just got tired of listening to her nag him to death. Still, it was hard on her with two little ones at home."

"Two?" Lucien asked, positively ashamed to think he had not known such a thing before. How could it be that he had worked with Danny, eaten meals with the boy, grown terribly fond of him, and known nothing at all about his family? About _Jean's_ family?

"A sister. Amy. Used to her see down the station all the time, she was always getting into trouble. Just like Jack. But she's kept her nose clean the last few years."

"Bloody hell." Lucien took a long sip from his whiskey glass, frowning. The afternoon had been full of revelations, but it seemed that the more he learned, the murkier the situation grew.

"What did Eadie want, anyway? She didn't tell me when I let her in the house. I reckoned someone must have died, she wouldn't have bothered to come otherwise."

Lucien took another drink, tried to order his thoughts, to put aside his own distress and his own failings as a fiance and focus instead on the memory of his encounter with Jean's sister.

"She came to tell Jean someone was coming home," he said slowly. "Someone called Tucker."

"Bloody hell." It was Matthew's turn to swear, and Lucien looked at him sharply, perplexed.

"Matthew, what on earth-"

"Have you talked to her? To Jean, I mean?" Matthew's expression was serious, and fierce; just the sound of that name _Tucker_ seemed to have put him on edge. Who could this man have been, Lucien wondered, to elicit such a response from Jean and Matthew both?

"She went up to her room, I thought-"

"Bloody hell, Lucien. She doesn't need to be alone at a time like this." It was often like this between them, Matthew reprimanding Lucien for some failure of character or courtesy, reminding him grimly where his focus ought to have been, and most days Lucien was grateful for it. Now, though, he only felt chastised and foolish.

"What are you-" he started to ask, started to defend himself, but Matthew was having none of it.

"Go and speak to her," Matthew said grimly. "Let her tell you what's going on. You need to hear it from her, not from me. I'll get myself down to the chippie. Something tells me Jean won't feel up to cooking tonight."

As he spoke he hauled himself up ponderously from his chair, groaning just a little. He settled his hands on his cane, looking down at Lucien who remained frozen on the sofa, more lost than he could recall having been since he returned to Ballarat to bury his father.

"You want to be a good husband, Lucien? You start right here. Go up there, and be there for her when she needs you most."

And then he turned, and limped from the room.


	2. Chapter 2

Though he gave himself enough time to finish his glass of whiskey Lucien did not linger in the sitting room for long; he had been given his marching orders, and curiosity drove him as much as did his love of Jean. She had been alone in her room at the top of the stairs for over an hour now, and his heart ached to think of her facing such distress by herself. Of course, she was not one to readily share her grief, her pain; Jean had always kept her heart tucked neatly away, out of sight, had always kept her chin up and her back straight and done her best not to fall to pieces where Lucien could see. There were exceptions, of course; that day in the sunroom, when Jack had broken her heart most completely, that afternoon in the garden when she had wept and told him that she was not ready to move beyond her love of her husband. Her family, it always came back to her family, and of course it did; nothing could wound more deeply, more fatally, than family. Lucien knew it, having lost his own, having suffered so long without them, and Jean knew it, too.

But there was so much about her family he did not know; as he mounted the stairs he wracked his brain, and realized he could not recall having ever discussed them with her. Not her parents, not her grandparents, not uncles or aunts, not nieces or nephews - except Danny, of course - not cousins or inlaws. Never, not once, had the subject come up. He had never asked, but then Jean had never volunteered, and they had been so happy with one another that he had not noticed before now that anything was missing. Somehow he could not help but feel that such apathy as regarded his fiance's past reflected poorly on him; what sort of man, he wondered, could show such little interest in his lover's life? How had he been so blind, how could he have thought she had no secrets beyond the walls of their home? Whatever lay hidden in the dim dark days of her youth Jean had protected it so carefully that Lucien had never suspected a thing.

He had not volunteered much information about his own family, but in truth this was because his family was rather pitiful, and a subject of too much pain. His mother had been an only child, and her parents had died in France before Lucien ever got the chance to meet them. His father had but one sister, an ornery, elegant lady who had fallen out with Thomas over his marriage to Genevieve, and never forgiven him. His aunt had at least one child, he knew, but he did not know his cousin's - _cousins'? - _name, and they did not live in Ballarat. There were more distant relations, scattered to the wind, but those people did not care for Lucien, and he did not care for them. Though he had learned that his wife was not dead at all he now had every intention of divorcing her, and his daughter lived with her husband and child on the other side of the sea. There was not much to say on the subject of his family.

But it seemed that when it came to Jean's family there was rather a lot more to discover. Had she come from one of those big farm families, he wondered, surrounded by siblings and cousins, constantly laughing, constantly playing? Had her life been full of people, full of noise, full of joy? Or had all those people stifled her, suffocated her beneath the weight of their affections and expectations? And what on earth could have caused such a rift between Jean and her sister?

At the top of the stairs Lucien drew in a very deep breath, prevaricating for a moment in front of Jean's door. Matthew had been quite certain that this was the right course of action but Lucien was not quite so sure. After all, Jean had told him _no,_ had chosen to walk away from him; would it be better to let her come to him in her own time?

Perhaps it might have been, but he could not bear to wait another moment longer. Lucien Blake was not the sort of man to leave a riddle unsolved.

And so, at last, he knocked, and held his breath as he waited for an answer.

"Come in, Lucien," Jean called softly from the other side of the door, and he opened it before it occurred to him that she had known without seeing him that he was the one intruding on her solitude. Of course, Matthew was hardly likely to come shuffling up the stairs to check on her, but it still seemed to him sometimes that Jean possessed the ability to read his very mind.

He closed the door behind him, and stood for a moment simply watching her, nervous and feeling distinctly out of place. Though they were engaged to be married they were not wed yet, and Jean was a proper Catholic woman. Lucien had never spent more than a moment or two in this place, and never with the door closed. It was overwhelmingly feminine, the pink wallpaper, the stockings draped over the mirror, the cosmetics and creams, the soft white curtains, the faint waft of her perfume on the air. This room was meant for Jean, and Jean alone; this bed was hers, and shared with no other, these things touched only by her hands. There was something mystical, almost sacrosanct about it; this was _her_ place, a woman's place, and Lucien felt huge and conspicuous standing there by the door with his hands in his pockets.

The wireless was playing softly, some quiet tune full of lament, and Jean was sitting cross-legged on the bed, small and delicate, beautiful in her sorrow. She had plucked the pins from her hair, shucked her shoes and slid out of her stockings, untucked her blouse from her skirt. It was not often that Lucien saw her in such disarray; oh, he had encountered her in the night wrapped in her robe more than once, but then she had been defended by the length of said robe and the severity of the net she wore over her hair. Now, like this, she was..._lovely, _soft and real, tired and so wholly without defense. She looked vulnerable and yet ethereal, a goddess walking the mortal plane, and he unworthy of the radiance of her presence.

"Come here, my love," she said softly, holding her hand out to him.

_My love, _that was new, an endearment she had not ever used with him before. In fact, she had never called him anything but his name, and as he went to stand beside her he wondered what had made her use it now. Was she remembering the woman she used to be? Had she been the sort to use such words, _sweetheart, love, my heart_ with those she loved before? Had the sudden wash of memories opened her heart, left her more willing to share of herself than he had ever known her to be? And what other secrets did she keep harbored in her heart, what other emotions had been locked away beyond his reach? There was so much he didn't know, and Lucien had never appreciated being kept in the dark.

He took her offered hand and squeezed it, and then looked down at the bed. Jean sat in the midst of a sea of photographs, an old wooden box lying open beside her. The faces in those photos stared up at him accusingly, strangers painted in tones of black and white and sepia, seeming to whisper him that this was not his place, that he did not deserve the answers he sought.

"Please, Jean," he said, his voice hushed by the heavy air of melancholy that had communicated itself to him from the touch of her hand. "Please tell me what's happened, my darling."

Still she held his hand, gazing up at him, and those eyes he loved were the eyes of a stranger, old and sad beyond her years.

"Here," she said, "sit." Jean pulled her hand away and cleared some of the photographs so Lucien could sit on the edge of her bed, perilously close to her bare leg. This, too, he had not ever done before, had not ever sat upon this bed, or any bed, so close to her, to her bare skin, and he was unused to the intimacy insinuated by their proximity. It seemed to him to be a day of firsts. On impulse he reached out and covered her knee with his palm, and breathed a sigh of relief when she did not push him away.

"I hardly know where to begin," she said, staring at those photographs all around her. "There's so much you don't know."

"Then tell me, Jean. Whatever it is. Let me help you."

Her answering smile was soft, and sad, and not at all reassuring.

"All right," she said. Carefully she reached out, picked out one photograph in particular, holding it gently, tenderly, as if she feared it might crumble into dust at the touch of her hand. She passed it to him and Lucien took it gingerly, trying to show her that he would be careful with this piece of her heart.

The photograph showed two men standing side-by-side, wearing matching Army uniforms, unsmiling. Their faces were set in the grim expression of soldiers preparing to go to war, and the cut of the uniform suggested to Lucien that the war they faced was the same one that had broken him. A thousand, a million such photographs had been taken in those days, photographs to be kept as mementos of these young men who might not ever come home again, but this one belonged to Jean, and so he knew it must be special indeed. Those two men - young men, he thought, neither of them a day over twenty-five - looked alarmingly similar; they were exactly the same height, with the same broad shoulders and narrow waists, and the features of their faces were identical.

"That's Christopher," Jean said, pointing to the man on the left. "Most people couldn't tell them apart, but I never had any trouble."

_Christopher. _That name had haunted Lucien from the night he first heard it. _My Christopher was a sergeant, too. I wonder what he'd make of you._ Always she called him that, _my Christopher, _possessive and aching with grief; through all the long years since this man's death Jean had remained true to his memory. Until now, of course, when she had finally agreed to marry Lucien at last. And since that night, that terrible night when Sergeant Hannam had nearly killed him, Lucien had asked himself more times than he could count what Christopher might think of _him._ Had asked himself what sort of man he had been, this man Jean loved. What sort of man could inspire such devotion in such a practical, level-headed woman, what sort of man could win her heart, when Lucien himself had made such a hash of courting her. What sort of man had shared her bed, her youth; what sort of things Christopher might have known that Lucien had never guessed at. And yet for all that Jean clearly loved her first husband, this was the very first time Lucien had ever seen his face.

It was a handsome face, he thought. Jack favored his father more than did young Christopher. Chris had inherited his mother's sharp cheekbones, her grey eyes, her determined spirit. Jack it seemed had inherited his father's unruly hair and his chiseled jaw. It was strange, but though he had known what it meant, that Jean had once had a husband of her own, he had never thought too long or too hard about her sharing her bed with this man. There was no denying it, now, looking at this photo; Jean had been young, once, and for years she had fallen asleep beside someone else, let him take her, again and again, had with her love and her body accepted him and made two children. With this man, who was now no more than a memory and a face in a photograph.

"And this," she said heavily, pointing to the young man who could only have been Christopher's twin, "is Tucker. His brother."

"Oh, Jean," Lucien sighed, realizing now why she had reacted so strongly to the news of this man's return. Christopher's twin brother; he must have been close to them both, Lucien thought, must have loved his brother and his sister-in-law and his nephews. And if both of them, Christopher and Tucker, had gone off to war together, Jean's heart must have ached for them. And neither of them had come home again, and Jean must have mourned for them both, down through the years, only to discover it was Tucker, and not Jean's husband, who had made it home at last; _Christ, _he thought, _how terrible this must be for her. _

Having experienced the shocking return of his own wife, the wife he'd thought long since dead, Lucien thought he could understand some of what Jean was feeling. Some of it, but not all, for Tucker was not her husband, was only his brother, close and dear to her but not the one she'd longed for most. Did she feel guilty, now, for wishing it was Christopher coming back to her arms? Or was she grateful it was not Christopher at all, and hating herself for it, for wanting to move on?

"There's so much you don't know," she said again, softly. "I thought I could leave the past where it was. I thought I could put it behind me. But I should have known better. We tried to do that once, didn't we? But Mei Lin came back. And now Tucker-" she lost her breath, lifted her hand to cover her mouth and took a moment to gather herself, and Lucien let her, let the silence hold them, let her find her own way back to him.

"I'm sorry, Lucien," she said. There was such grief in her face, such hopelessness, and Lucien could stand it no more; he reached out his arms to her, and she came to him, let him hold her while in his arms she began to weep.


	3. Chapter 3

At last she seemed to gather herself, settled back against the headboard with the photo of Christopher and Tucker clutched in her hands, her gaze fixed on it and avoiding him entirely.

"I thought none of it mattered any more, Lucien, but now I think that was wrong. You deserve to hear the truth."

Such simple words, and yet they scared him witless. What horrors could possibly lurk unspoken in Jean's past, that she would speak of them so gravely? He had thought he knew enough of her life, that she and Christopher had wed young and raised their children on the farm that had become Ben Dempster's, that she'd lost her husband and grieved for him, that she'd come to work for Thomas Blake and since then lived a quiet life centered on her church and her sewing circle and all those people she had gathered under her wing. What more could there have been? She wasn't like him, brash and reckless, leaving a trail of wreckage everywhere he went; Jean was good, and kind, and she loved with her whole heart. Everyone in town agreed that Jean Beazley was above reproach, and before he'd met Eadie no one had ever said an unkind word about her in his hearing. What sort of secrets could such a woman harbor?

"You may not want to marry me anymore, once you've heard it," she said miserably. "But you ought to know what sort of woman you're marrying. It wouldn't be right to keep you in the dark for my own selfish reasons."

"Jean, please-" Lucien begged her, desperately, but still she refused to look at him.

"It's only that I love you so much, sweetheart," she said. "And I want this. I want this life we've dreamed about. We've worked so hard to get to this point and I couldn't bear to lose you. But I can't lie to you, either."

It was quite the most impassioned speech Jean had ever given on the topic of their impending marriage. Oh, he had known that she was keen, knew that she was too practical, too proud to accept his ring if she did not want it with everything she had. Lucien had felt the yearning in her kiss and been content; Jean would not have kissed him that way, he knew, if she did not love him. And yet she did not often speak the words, did not often tell him what he meant to her, did not often express herself so plainly. But there was naked fear on her face, now, at the prospect of losing their marriage, and her voice had been full of heat as she told him that she loved him. Speechless in the face of such open regard Lucien reached out and took her hand, lifted it to his lips and kissed her palm gently.

Her touch was soft and full of devotion as that same hand moved from his lips to cradle his cheek, her thumb ruffling the neat line of his beard. Such gentle affection never failed to move him, coming from her, this woman who was otherwise reserved and restrained in everything she did. How could it be, he wondered, that she sat before him worried that she was not worthy of his love, when Lucien knew full well that of the pair of them _he_ was the one most undeserving?

"There is nothing you could tell me that would make me love you any less, my darling," Lucien said earnestly, believing every word.

"You haven't heard this," she told him sadly, and then drew her hand away, and a chill ran down Lucien's spine at the loss of her touch. For a moment she sat still and silent, the photo of Christopher and Tucker still balanced on her lap. It seemed to Lucien that she was gathering her thoughts, preparing herself to speak, and he waited anxiously to hear what she had to tell him.

"The Beazleys lived next door to us, growing up," Jean began slowly, and though Lucien had decided he would sit quietly and listen he found himself interrupting almost at once.

"Who's _us, _Jean?" he asked her. "Is Eadie your only sister?"

Jean smiled a bit wistfully as she answered. "Yes, but we have three older brothers. David married an English girl after the war and settled down there. Howard didn't come back from Malaya. And Andrew...well. You remember Henry Dent?"

Lucien nodded, confused; _what does Henry have to do with any of this? _

"Let's just say Andrew and Henry got on very well when we were young. _Very _well. And when Andrew moved to Sydney, Henry missed him more than our parents did."

_That_ was not something he'd expected her to say. Four siblings, one of them killed in the war, one of them who seemed to disdain her, one who had moved to England and never looked back, and one who was...well. Though he and Jean had brushed up against the topic a time or two she had always been equal parts compassionate and determined not to discuss her feelings on the matter of the local homosexuals. There had been that case with the murdered salesman, the landlord with some questionable proclivities, but Lucien and Jean had still been treating one another gingerly then. And then with Henry, Lucien had just assumed that Jean's rather blase attitude about the whole thing had grown from her childhood friendship with the man. A friendship, Lucien realized, that must have been stronger than he'd previously believed, if Henry had been so close to Jean's older brother. No wonder she'd followed the older boy around when she was a girl, no wonder she'd had so many chances to hear his stories, his plans for the future; they must have spent a fair bit of time together. And yet Jean had never told him any of this, had kept this secret for herself.

_She's telling you now, though, _he reminded himself. It did not matter, really, that she had not told him before, because she had found it in her heart to trust him with these secrets tonight, and her trust was precious to him.

"The Beazleys had four boys. Bugsy is the oldest, and then Laurie, and then Christopher and Tucker. The twins were born two weeks before I was, and the farms weren't very far apart. I can't recall ever going a day without seeing Christopher, until he joined the army."

"Oh, Jean," Lucien sighed. It was quite the sweetest, saddest thing he'd ever heard, this story she was spilling out to him. She and Christopher must have been childhood sweethearts, must not have known how to live without one another, and yet he had been so cruelly ripped away from her. _No wonder she grieved him for so long. _Christ, he thought, how it must have wounded her, to send her man off to war, to wake without him, to look into the faces of their sons and know he was never coming home again. Lucien knew what it was to grieve for a spouse, but he and Mei Lin had not known one another for so long, and he had not had to soldier on as Jean had done; he had been given the chance to fall to pieces, while Jean been forced to remain strong for the sake of her children.

"Bugsy and Laurie, they were the troublemakers. My mother didn't approve of them. She told my brothers to say away from them, but boys don't often listen to their mothers, do they?"

Lucien didn't quite know what to say to that; his own mother had died when he was small, and while he had a daughter he had no sons of his own. His experiences with boys and their relationships with their mothers was limited indeed. Jean though, Jean had grown up surrounded by boys, had raised two of them herself, and he supposed that if she said it, it must be true.

"Everyone loved Tucker, though. He was...he was everybody's friend. He was funny, and he was kind. If there was ever a job that needed doing he was the first to volunteer, and he was always smiling. It was Tucker I started walking out with first. Not Christopher."

Somewhere in the back of Lucien's mind the beast of jealousy roared to life. He had always known that he was not the first to love her; she bore another man's name, had borne his children. But before now he had always assumed that Christopher had been the beginning and the end of romance for Jean. After all, in all the time he'd known her she'd only ever had two suitors, and she had pursued neither of them with much determination, and ended each relationship before it grew into something more serious. She'd never mentioned it before, the connections that had bound her to other men, and before now Lucien had felt a bit of pride, knowing he'd managed to turn her head when no one else had succeeded. Of course, they were talking about her youth, now, her teenage years so long behind her, and teenage indiscretions hardly counted as great love affairs. But _this _particular indiscretion was coming home to roost, and Lucien liked that not one bit. He swallowed down his outrage, however, for he knew that his own past was littered with failed romances, and if Jean did not hate him for them then he supposed he owed her the same understanding.

"My mother was thrilled about that. But then I started seeing Christopher instead. I was about eighteen at the time, and I wanted to see the world. I wanted to travel, and go on adventures. Tucker didn't want to leave the farm. He was happy here. Christopher, though...my Christopher was a dreamer, and I loved him for it."

But she _had _settled on the farm, and Lucien's heart broke at the note of melancholy in her tone. _My Christopher was a dreamer._ How those dreams must have turned her head, a young girl of eighteen stifled and miserable in her quiet country life; how much hope they must have given her. And yet Lucien knew the woman that girl had become, and he knew she had never left the provincial town of her birth. What calamity must have befallen her, he wondered, that had turned all those dreams to ashes in her hands?

"I was nineteen when...when I...oh, Lucien, please don't hate me."

Her eyes were round and scared, her hands clenched tight together in her lap, and Lucien reached out at once, covering her hands with his own.

"I could never hate you, my darling," he told her firmly. "Not ever, not for anything."

"I was nineteen when I fell pregnant," she whispered, and those words set off a roaring in Lucien's head like a thousand fighter planes taking off all at once. That was the answer, then, the answer to at least one of his many questions. Nineteen and - he guessed from the way her lip was trembling - unmarried, Jean had fallen pregnant, and every dream she and Christopher ever shared had gone up in smoke.

"My mother was horrified. She didn't think Christopher was good enough for me. He wasn't a hard worker like Tucker, he was...changeable. She begged me to say...to say that it was Tucker, and not Christopher. She thought I'd be happier if I married him instead."

_Christ, _what a nightmare; how scared she must have been, young and full of hope, hearing such horrible things from her own mother. He tried to picture it, the girl Jean had been, how different she might have looked so many years before, tried to imagine how her heart must have shattered, when faced with such strife. It was far too heavy a burden to place on one so young, he thought, and if the ravaged expression on her face was anything to go by Jean had not shared this burden with anyone else before. It was a precious gift she gave him now, this story, this piece of her past, and Lucien resolved himself to treat her gently.

"If I had, maybe things would have been better," Jean continued in a soft, sad voice. "He wouldn't have minded. He told me so himself."

"You actually asked him?" Now _that_ was surprising; he didn't imagine she was capable of such duplicity. But of course she wasn't, and she told him so.

"No, no I didn't ask. He offered. He already had a good job at the factory and he was renting a room in town. He told me he had almost enough saved up for a house, that we could live together and everything would be all right. Tucker didn't care that the baby wasn't his. He said…"

* * *

_He said, we're identical, Jeannie. The kid might as well be mine. Please, Jeannie. Please let me take care of you. Chris is all right - Christ, he's my brother. You know I love him. But I know what he's like. He's never held down a steady job and he likes to drink and he gambles -_

_I know very well what he's like, she'd told him, but I love him, Tucker. I do._

_Him, and not me?_


	4. Chapter 4

It had been so long, so very long, since that day sitting on the fallen tree on the edge of her parents' farm, Tucker right beside her, staring at her like she was the most precious thing he'd ever seen. He'd meant every word of it, then, and she knew it. Funny that, she thought, how a life could turn on a single decision. How everything had changed in that moment, how every twist and turn of her life from that day to this could be traced back to that one single instant, when Tucker had offered her all of himself, and she'd refused him, traded a life of security for one full of trouble, but full of hope, too.

"At any rate," she said, clearing her throat. "I couldn't lie about something so important. I married Christopher, and Tucker joined the army. I don't regret it, Lucien," she added fiercely.

No, she didn't regret it. Things might have been better, might have been easier, if she'd made a different choice. Maybe neither of those boys would have gone to war, if she'd made another choice. Maybe her family would never have fractured, maybe her heart would not have known this grief, this guilt. But if she had accepted Tucker then, she would not have had her boys, would not have had the precious years she'd spent with Christopher, would likely not be sitting next to Lucien now. Maybe things would have been better, but her life would have been so very different, and she knew better than to waste time with _what ifs _and _might have beens. _

"It was easier, with Tucker gone," she said. There was a great deal more she could have told him; she could told him how she'd lost the baby, how Christopher had tried his best to pretend there'd never been baby at all, how her mother had looked at her with accusing eyes as if it were all somehow her fault, how she'd wept, to think how she'd traded her future for the sake of a child she never even got to hold. She could have told him, but didn't; though she was determined to share her secrets with him tonight, she believed that some secrets were meant to be kept. "Christopher was never much of a farmer, and we struggled, but we were happy. For a time. I told you he was a dreamer, and I loved that about him. He had such a good heart, and he had so much hope. But I was always the one who had to remind him that we had bills to pay, that we needed food for the boys. I had to put an end to so many of his dreams. And then the war came."

The damned, bloody war. Jean knew she did not have to tell him what horror the war had wrought, how terrible it had been; the war had left its mark on Lucien, too, torn his family asunder and left a spiderweb of scars across his broad back. His war had been different from her own, however, and her story was not yet done.

"All the boys signed up to fight. My brothers and Christopher's, too. Tucker had already been in the army for years by then. But Christopher didn't want to go. Not at first. We had the farm, and our boys were so little. He was afraid. But it was all his mother could talk about, sending her sons off to war, how proud she was of them. And then Tucker sent a postcard. To me."

_Jeannie, _that little card had said, _I just wanted you to know that I'm well. I don't really have anyone else to write to. Well, mum, I guess, but I wanted to write to you. Hug the boys for me, and Chris, too, the old bastard. All my love, Tuck. _She knew every word by heart, and the little card was buried in the box beside her, just in case she ever forgot.

"That's what sent Christopher over the edge, I think. He was always comparing himself to Tucker. I don't think he knew how close I'd come to...but, well, he always thought I had my eye on the other brother. He thought everyone did. He thought he'd never measure up. And so he joined the army, to prove he was just as good as Tucker." _To prove he was good enough for me. _

Jean could not count the number of times they'd argued about it, the number of times she'd tried with all her might to convince Christopher that she loved _him, _just as he was. That he alone was enough. There was never enough money and the house needed work and their sons needed shoes but she had been so happy with him, and Christopher had never really come to accept it. He thought he wasn't enough; but oh, Jean had worried the same thing, had worried that nothing she did, nothing she said, no matter how many times she told him she loved him, how many times she wrapped her legs around his waist and drew him in to her she would never be able to convince him that she loved him _enough. _

_He was enough for me, _she thought. _But I couldn't be enough for him. _

As she told her tale, let it unfold before them, Lucien had watched her with a stricken expression on his face. What a heart he had, this man she loved now; there was compassion enough in that heart for everyone, even for Jean, with all her many secrets. She loved his tender heart and his broad shoulders, loved his unparalleled mind. He was a dreamer, too, her Lucien, but unlike Christopher he had reached for those dreams with both hands, had been brave enough - or rich enough - to take all those chances that had always seemed just out of reach for Jean and her husband. Lucien had spun a dream around her, a promise that one day he would marry her, and they would see the world together, as she'd always wanted to do. A dream of love he'd given to her, a promise of so much joy.

_Christopher promised me, too,_ Jean thought. And somewhere deep in her heart she feared that Lucien's promises would amount to no more than Christopher's had done, for though Lucien had proposed to her he remained married to another. _Divorce _was a terrible word in Jean's world, and one that would spell the end of her good name and her relationship with her choice. And it remained unspoken, as yet, for Lucien and Mei Lin were still wed. _How long will this go on?_ She asked herself now. _How long will he give me dreams, and nothing more?_

"And then neither of them came home," Lucien said solemnly, as if he'd just worked out the end of the story.

Jean almost laughed in his face. For such a smart man, he really could be thick, sometimes.

"Tucker did," Jean said. "When the war ended, Tucker came home. Just for a few months. He was real army, not a volunteer."

_Jeannie, please, Tucker had said, standing on her doorstep with his rucksack over his shoulder, looking so much like Christopher that Jean felt herself torn between cursing him and kissing him, wanting him and hating him in equal measure. All through the long years she had prayed for her boys, prayed that God would bring them home, but in the end it was only Tucker, and she felt grief and relief and self-loathing and horror all at once, just at the sight of his face._

_You shouldn't be here-_

_Where else should I be, if not here with you? With my family?_

There was one last piece of the story she had not told, and though she had reached the point in the telling when she knew she ought to share it, the words would not come. She'd left out plenty of details along the way - had not told Lucien how heavy handed her father had been, how she'd lost her first child, why she no longer talked to Eadie - but this was one she knew she could not keep to herself. It had occurred to her, when Lucien had come knocking on her door, that secrets were like poison. He had kept his secrets, and those secrets had come back to them, left them both in grief. When she'd accepted his ring she had made him promise to hold nothing back from her, but she could not expect such honesty from him if she did not return it to him in kind.

"Tucker stayed with me for those months. To help with the farm and the boys. At the time I thought my mother would object, but now I think she was just hoping we'd sort something out between us."

_Just say it was Tucker, Jeannie, please, just say it was him, no one will ever know, and you'll have a proper life._

"I never should have let him come to stay."

_I never should have let him hold my hand, never should have let him touch my face, never should have kissed him, never should have led him down the hallway, never should have laid down beside him…_

"Did he hurt you, Jean?"

The very idea of it was laughable; Tucker had never even dreamed of hurting her. He didn't need to; Jean did a fine job inflicting pain all on her own.

"No, never. But he...we...it wasn't…"

"You slept with him?" He had that look on his face, that expression he always wore when he solved a riddle; Jean had never before understood how terrible it felt to be on the other side of his analytical skills.

_Damn this man, this clever, beautiful man, _she thought. There was no judgment in his gaze as he looked at her now, though, no accusation. Only understanding. Of course he would understand; Lucien Blake was a worldly man. No doubt he'd known more than his fair share of women. No doubt he understood the burden of waking each day without the one he loved, the temptation of having someone warm and kind close to hand, the way a heart could yearn for someone to hold.

"Yes," she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

_Yes, _she had on one dark night in the depth of winter given up, and given in. He'd looked so much like Christopher, and she'd been so lonesome, and they'd known one another for such a long time, and he had always treated her so gently, and Jean had done the unthinkable. Just once she'd let him take her to bed, just once she'd fallen asleep beside him. In the morning she'd woken, and burst into tears, and told him raggedly that he had to leave. He could not stay; she could not give him what he wanted of her. Her love had not been enough for Christopher, and by then there was hardly any love left in her at all. All that love had faded beneath the weight of her grief, and it was not until Lucien touched her that she felt it come back to her at last.

"And then he left. The army called him back, and he went to Korea. And that's where he was captured. They told us he died there."

_Only he didn't, he didn't, he's come back now, just like Mei Lin. Oh, god help me, the past will not stay buried. Will Christopher come back, too, before the end? Will all the ghosts come walking, and demand an accounting of me? Oh, god forgive me, maybe I was never meant to be happy. _

It had often seemed to Jean that for every piece of happiness she claimed for herself, a hundred heartaches followed. Whatever made her heart light had the power to wound her, to grieve her, to shake her to pieces, and this was no different. She'd had such hope for her future with Lucien, had dreamed of his hands and the warmth of his embrace, had fallen asleep grinning at the very thought that he loved her. The reckoning had come for her now, as she always feared it would.

"I came to work for your father not long after that," she said, not wanting to leave the story unfinished. "Bugsy and Laurie have each married, and they live outside town. Eadie lives close by, but I don't see her much. I don't see any of them much. There's too many memories, Lucien, and I always felt...every time I'm with them, I feel as if I'm back in the past. Stuck. You know what that's like, when everyone expects you to be a certain person, and no one sees you for who you really are."

_Or maybe I am who they think I am, fickle and selfish and proud, and maybe I've brought this all on myself, maybe I deserve this -_

"I see you, Jean," he said softly. "I see you, and I love you."


	5. Chapter 5

It was rather a lot of information to digest all at once, and Lucien's head was spinning, but he was grateful, so bloody grateful, to know that she had trusted him enough to share all this with him. He needed her to know that he understood it, that he did not hate her for it; somehow knowing that Jean was not perfect, that she had struggled and wept and made mistakes, that she could feel remorse and longing just as much as anyone else only made him love her more. She tried so hard to put on a brave face but to see her sharing with him so openly, so honestly now, to know that she loved and trusted him enough to offer him this glimpse into her past awed him in a way. Whether he deserved it or not, he wanted to prove himself worthy of her regard, her love, her honesty.

"Look at me please, my darling," he said.

Jean lifted her chin, tears sparkling on her cheeks, soft curls bouncing all around her face, that face he loved so well. Gently Lucien reached out and brushed those tears away with his fingertips.

"You have nothing to be ashamed of," he said. She opened her mouth as if to protest, but he cut across her quickly. "You have loved, Jean. Every choice you made, you made it out of love. We can't know in the moment if the choice is the right one, and once it's made there's no way to undo it. But you shouldn't feel guilty for loving someone. And I do know what you mean, about expectations. Everywhere I go in this town people look at me, and they see what they want to see. But most of them...most of them mean well. You taught me that, Jean. It's all love, in the end. Just different kinds of love."

"But what I did-"

"Would you love me any less, if I told you about every inappropriate woman I've ever gone to bed with?"

She blanched at those words, and he could hardly blame her; it was not their way, to discuss such things. Church and society had taught Jean to be tight-lipped on the subject of extramarital activities, and Lucien had spent too long in regret to revisit his mistakes now. And yet he felt that they must; Jean had pointed out the importance of honesty between them, and Lucien could not, would not falter now.

"It's hardly the same-"

"No, it isn't the same," he agreed. "But we've all made mistakes. That's part of life, Jean. And you can try to lock yourself away and hide and never reach for you want, or you can live. And I want you to live, my darling. I want you to be happy."

"Oh, Lucien," she sighed, and he could sense that something was wrong, that though he'd tried to say the right thing he hadn't quite hit his mark. This night had already pushed Jean so far beyond her boundaries, and he was hesitant to push for more, but still it seemed to him that this thing between them was unfinished, and he did not want to leave things as they were.

"I've tried so hard," she said then, "to do the right thing, to be better than I was back then. I want so many things but...how can I trust myself now?" her eyes were wide and pleading, and so very sad.

When they first met, Lucien had thought Jean frigid, and judgmental. She had worn her disapproval like armor, had lived a life that seemed small, contained, almost meager to his eyes. In the beginning, he had found her fierce grey unsettling, for they seemed to watch his every move, and no matter what he did it seemed he always disappointed her, that nothing he did would ever be good enough to merit her approval. Since those early days he had learned so very much about her, but he had not understood until now. Until this moment, when she finally told him all these many secrets, when he could finally see for himself that it was fear, not small-mindedness, that had left her so reserved. Having lost so much, she must have doubted her own heart, her own mind, must have been worried that the things she wanted she could not have. He could see it all so clearly, could see how a beautiful, gentle woman like Jean could hide herself away, could try so hard to restrain her own impulses and desires in a desperate attempt to keep from causing more damage. No wonder she had seemed so lonely when they first met; she'd been paying penance for nearly two decades, and no absolution had come to her.

But _oh, _how wished that was not so. Jean, his Jean, brilliant, beautiful, clever, had a heart so strong, so very _good, _and she deserved nothing but joy. If she was not brave enough to reach for it now, after all of her many losses, Lucien decided he would take it upon himself to bring that joy to her.

"Do you trust me, Jean?" he asked her.

For a moment she simply sat, still and staring, but then at last she reached out to him, her hand once more cradling his cheek.

"With my life," she answered.

"Then trust me, Jean. I love you, with all my heart. And you love me, yes?"

"More than I thought possible," she told him earnestly.

_Christ, _how he hoped that were true. She had loved her Christopher once, might have even loved Tucker, too, but those days were far behind them both. The past had come and it had gone, and it was not the past Lucien wanted to look to now. He wanted only the future, the two of them together, shouldering one another's burdens and facing life side-by-side.

"That's all that matters then," he said, turning his head and kissing her palm once more.

"You make it sound so simple," she said, her hand still gently touching his face. "But Tucker's here now. I have to go and see him. And you-"

"I understand," he said simply, for he did. After all, the very night he'd first tried to propose to Jean he had flung the door open wide, and found his wife standing there. One moment he had been right on the cusp of taking Jean in his arms, and the next he'd been holding Mei Lin. He knew what it was, to be faced with an old love after so many years, to see the old love and the new standing side-by-side, to reach a fork in the road of his life and wonder which path he ought to take. Jean had given him the time and the space that he needed - much as it wounded it him - and in the end there had been no choice at all. Too much time had passed, and too much had happened, and Mei Lin did not want him any more than Lucien wanted her. They were strangers to one another, every tie between them severed.

Yes, a part of his heart was worried about what might happen when Jean was faced with the same circumstances, what she might do when given such a choice. But he knew that she had to go, had to see this man with her own eyes, had to speak to him, and make the choice herself, freely and of her own volition. Perhaps, he told himself, Jean would find this man as indelibly changed as Mei Lin had been, and perhaps she would be able to do as Lucien had done, and let go of the past with peace in her heart. She deserved that, he thought, to close the book on all those old sins and step out into the sunlight of her future without those burdens to weigh her down.

"You do, don't you?" she said softly. "I didn't think anyone else would ever understand any of this. I didn't think I'd ever be able to share it with anyone. But you…" she sighed and then reached out, brushing aside all the photographs that still littered the bed so she could slide closer to him. Reflexively Lucien lifted his arm and she slid beneath it, resting her head against his chest. "I sometimes feel as if we were made for one another, you and I," she said softly.

"I know we were, my darling," Lucien told her. Perhaps it was fanciful or fatalistic, but he could not help but share that sentiment. His hands had been made to hold her, he thought, his heart made to love her, and every loss, every ounce of grief, every foolish mistake had led him to this place where he could sit with his arms around her. Who else could ever hope to know him, truly know him, save for this woman who had walked a road so similar to his own? And who else could love her, truly love her, save for a man who knew what it was to love and to lose and yet reach for love again?

"I'm afraid I have to ask for your forgiveness, my darling," he said, breathing in the soft scent of her hair, relishing the warmth of her beside him.

"What on earth for?" she asked, lifting her chin to gaze up at him, exhaustion written on every line of her face.

"For never asking, before now. I never knew anything about your family, and I never asked, and I'm sorry."

"It's not as if I ever tried to tell you." She shuffled a little closer to him, and his hand drifted to settle against the curve of her waist. "I thought what we had was enough. I thought we were happy as we were. I didn't want to talk about all these terrible things. I didn't want to remember."

"But it's a part of you, Jean."

"Not all of me, though."

_No, _he thought, _not all. Not even half. _Her family, her childhood, these things had formed the foundation of her life, but Jean herself was so much more than just the experiences of her youth. She had made a life for herself, had found her own way, and she sat beside him independent and lovely, trying to find hope for her future, trying not to let her past define or consume her. Lucien had loved her before he knew anything of her family, and he loved her still, all of her, every piece of her, and that would not change.

"I didn't think you'd want to know," she whispered into the stillness between them.

At those words Lucien turned slightly, caught her face in his hands and lifted her chin so that he could look into those brilliant eyes he loved so well.

"I want to know everything about you, Jean." _The softness of your skin, the taste of you, the sounds you make when you're sleeping, every bad habit, every mistake, everywhere you've been and everywhere you want to go. _

"What if you don't like what you find?"

"Not possible, my darling," he assured her, and then he bowed his head and kissed her, and she let him, and in the soft press of their lips it seemed to him that maybe, just maybe, Jean had begun the process of forgiving herself at last.


	6. Chapter 6

The noise came washing over her, fierce and all consuming, a noise like the droning of a million bees or the crashing of waves on the shore, the noise of home, the noise of insecurity lurking just beneath the surface. How had she forgotten the noise? The clink of glasses, the shrieking of children, the yip of a dog caught underfoot, the constant, unending sea of noise that came from a house full of people who loved one another and knew no other life. The noise of _home,_ the noise of family; Jean had not heard such a noise for over a decade. Her life in the Doctor's home was quiet, stately, roomy, elegant; there were no dogs roaming the sitting room, there were no dirty dishes left on the sideboard, there was no uproarious laughter of good-hearted drunks. While he was alive the elder Blake had enjoyed no more than one glass of whiskey a day, and as for the younger Blake, well, he was not a particularly gregarious drunk. Lucien was as apt to weep as he was to brawl when he was drunk, and there was no good humor in him when he'd lost himself in the bottle. There were empty beds and full bellies in the Doctor's house, while in the world that Jean came from it had always been the other way around, and the corridors were still and silent after suppertime. Even now when there was such joy in the grand house on Mycroft Avenue, after supper there was peace; Matthew would watch his quiz show or read a book, and Lucien would pick out a tune on the piano or pour over a medical journal, and Jean would sit with her knitting, and they were all of them quiet in their contentment.

Not so here; Jean fancied that she could almost see the walls bulging outwards as Laurie's house was filled to capacity, and she had never felt quite so out of place as she did in that moment.

The house was a bit the worse for wear, the roof in need of repair and the front porch sagging at the corners. The wallpaper was peeling and the carpet was stained, the furnishings threadbare and ten years out of date, but no one in that place cared. They sat or stood or perched on the arms of occupied sofas and armchairs, every adult holding a cup of something, every mouth moving. The men were gathered in the sitting room - except for those who had gathered on the gravel drive to smoke - and the women in the kitchen, the children tearing through the house, back and forth between the two camps, too young yet to take the places they would assume when they grew up.

Laurie and his wife Clare had four children, and each of them had married and had children of their own. Bugsy and Delores had five children, and each of them had married and had children of their own, too. Eadie and Amy were there, and Christopher's old pals Mike Hereward and Bruce whats-his-name with their wives. There were a few others Jean did not recognize - and surely, she thought, there were too many little ones, but Laurie had eight or nine grandchildren by now, and Bugsy had at least ten, so maybe the count wasn't as far off as she'd first imagined - but so many of these faces were familiar to her, if a bit older than when she'd last seen them. The men all had mud on their boots and most of the children had cake smeared across their faces, and most of the women were wearing trousers just like their husbands. Jean clutched her handbag as if it were a lifeline, wondering what on earth she'd been thinking, coming to this place.

She had taken care when she'd dressed that morning. Her favorite brown skirt, the one embroidered with little flecks of colored thread, flared around her knees, and she'd carefully ironed her pale pink blouse before tucking it neatly into her skirt. The weather was fine and she'd had no need of a coat, but she had pinned a brown felt hat atop her neat curls. Her makeup, too, had been applied with care, and her brown suede pumps had been spotless before she'd stepped out of Lucien's car and onto the gravel. He'd offered to drive her, but she'd asked to come alone; Jean was quite competent behind the wheel of a car, and she wanted to have it handy in case she felt the need to escape at a moment's notice. The car, too, didn't quite fit with this scene; every other car parked haphazardly in front of Laurie's home was at least ten years older than Lucien's, and a hundred times as dirty. When she'd left the house that morning she'd wanted only to make a good impression, but as she looked around now she realized what a fool she had been. _Too far up yourself, _Eadie had said, and now here Jean stood, too neat, too pretty, too well put-together, driving the doctor's car; it was exactly the wrong sort of impression.

"Well, well, well, look who it is," a voice crooned from somewhere off to her left, and she spun to face the speaker, incensed, but she needn't have worried. It was only Bugsy, with his bushy beard and his bloodshot eyes, his paunchy belly testing the limits of his shirt buttons, and he was smiling at her. "Give us a kiss, Jeannie" he said, and before she could protest he had caught her in a hug so fierce and strong he nearly lifted her from her feet, planting a great wet, smacking kiss against her cheek.

"It's good to see you, girlie," he said when he released her. Jean was blushing furiously, reaching up subconsciously to straighten her hat. It had been years since last anyone had called her _girlie. _

"Ever the charmer I see, Bugsy," she said.

"Only with the pretty girls," he said, winking at her outrageously. "You been away from us too long, Jeannie." It was not an accusation, and for that she was very grateful.

"You know how it is," she said, and though she did not shrug she came perilously close. "Life gets busy."

"Don't it just." Leave it to Bugsy - whose real name was Donald, though no one had ever used it and Jean had never quite understood where _Bugsy _came from, anyway - to welcome her, and not to question her. That wasn't his way; Bugsy didn't expect much from anyone, and though he drank more than was wise his bloodshot eyes saw more than anyone else's. "Tuck's outside," he told her in a quiet voice. "I reckon you'd want to talk to him first, before you go ten rounds with this lot."

"Thank you," she told him earnestly, giving his forearm a little squeeze in gratitude. He gestured vaguely towards the back door and then sauntered away, and Jean squared her shoulders, preparing herself to march out that door and meet her doom

To reach the door she'd have to pass through the kitchen first, however, and that meant passing by the wives. Most of the women had babies on their hips - their own, or grandchildren, or nieces or nephews - but there was an open bottle of wine on the table and every inch of the countertop was covered with plates and plates of food, half-eaten. Though Jean had missed the meal portion of the day's festivities she knew how it would have gone; the women would have spent the morning sweating in the kitchen, and then each of them would have made up a plate for their man and carried it to him in the sitting room. And then they would have gathered around the little kitchen, those who did not have chairs leaning against the counters, and eaten their own meals with one hand while feeding the children with the other. And then they would have gone and taken the empty plates from their men, topped up everyone's cup, and sat for a moment before they set about washing up. It was the way things had always been done, and the way they always would be.

It was too much to hope, she supposed, that she could pass by them without being spotted. She had no sooner set foot in the kitchen than Clare called out her name, and then it began, the gauntlet of hugs and cheek kisses from those who did not know why she had been absent from them so long and those who did not care, while Eadie and the ladies she'd managed to infect with her poison lingered on the edges, busying themselves with some unimportant task and listening with ears pricked for the slightest misstep from Jean.

The _how are yous _and _I haven't seen you at church for a whiles, _and _where are your boys now, Jean? Such handsome lads _came thick and fast but Jean escaped as quickly as she could, the hair on the back of her neck prickling beneath the weight of her sister's baleful stare. It came as a relief when at last she stepped outside and closed the door smartly behind her. It was a fine warm day and the sun was shining, and she took a deep breath of the fresh air, relaxing out here where the walls and the people did not crowd her. But the relief lasted only for a moment, for as she breathed in she caught the faintest whiff of cigarette smoke, and when she looked there he stood beneath a tall old tree, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a cigarette to his lips.

It was not entirely like seeing a ghost. If he were a ghost surely he would have looked not a day over thirty, still young and strong and handsome as he had been when last she'd seen him. He wasn't; he was rangy and thin, much too thin, and he'd grown a beard, a beard that was almost entirely grey, now. His dark hair had been cropped close, and no longer fell in unruly curls over his sparkling blue eyes. Those eyes, too, had changed; they were sunken in his face, now, and not laughing as he looked at her. But there was no denying that it was _him, _and tears threatened to overwhelm her as she looked at him. Tucker, come home at last, and while she was so glad to know that he still lived, that he had not died cold and lonesome out there in the world, her heart broke afresh as she looked at him. _This is what he would have looked like if he'd lived, _she thought. _If my Christopher had lived, and we'd grown old together, his face would be wrinkled like this, and his beard would be white, and his smile would look just like this one. _

Of course Christopher lived only in her mind, perpetually young and strong, but still the vision of Tucker shook her to her very core as she looked at him and wondered how different her life might have been, if only. When she was a girl, she had dreamed of spending the rest of her life with Christopher, and to be offered this glimpse of that could have been life now, when it was beyond her reach, seemed to her to be the height of cruelty.

"Jean?" Tucker called softly, uncertainly.

_He doesn't recognize me, _she thought, for as much as he had changed over the years she knew she must have as well. She'd been a bit...well.._rounder_ in her youth, especially when the boys were small, and her face had been smooth and unlined. She had not worn her hair like this, and her nails had never been painted, and she'd never owned a blouse so fine as the one upon her back.

The courteous thing to do would have been to answer him, but Jean could not find the strength to speak. She simply stood there, staring at him across the grass. They might have stayed that way all afternoon, if Tucker had not moved, but of course he did; he pitched his cigarette into the dirt and stubbed it out with his toe, and then marched smartly towards her until he was close enough for her to reach out and touch him if she dared.

She didn't, couldn't; she only stood there, staring at his face, drinking in the sight of him. In some ways he was a stranger to her - she did not know where he'd been, what he'd seen, how the time had changed him - but his face, this face, had been with her since her earliest memories, and she had never forgotten it.

"You grew up, Jean," he said. Despite the habits of their friends and family, Tucker almost never called her _Jeannie. _When she was young she'd loved that; it made her feel so grown up, to hear him call her by her proper name and not the diminutive. But now it only made her sad, a reminder of how much things had changed, a reminder of a life that had slipped through her fingers.

"So did you," she told him softly, finding her voice at last.

"Happens to the best of us, I suppose."

"Yes, I suppose it does."

They fell silent then, both of them. Jean's hands were still clenched around her handbag, her eyes still on his face, but no words came to her. What could she possibly say to this man? The last time she'd seen him she'd woken naked beside him in her marriage bed and wept, and begged him to go, and he had done as she asked, and never returned. What could she say to soothe the sting of that pain, to heal whatever wounds he'd collected during the long years of his absence? What could she say to mend her own broken heart?

"The boys?" he asked after a time.

"They're well." She smiled, grateful for something pleasant, something normal to talk about. "Jack's living in Melbourne, and Christopher is in Adelaide. He's married now, and he has the most beautiful little girl."

"That's good," Tucker said.

"Yes."

That avenue of conversation exhausted they settled once more into silence. Tucker reached into his pocket and pulled out another cigarette, stuck a match, inhaled, dropped the match into the dirt. He hadn't smoked when they were young; Jean remembered that clearly. She never could abide the smell of cigarettes.

"Where have you been?" The words came tumbling out of her lips before she could stop them. But of course she _had _to know, was dying to know, could not go another second without knowing; perhaps Lucien had rubbed off on her more than she realized.

"Korea," Tucker said shortly. And wasn't that strange, she thought; Tucker had always been full of laughter, constantly talking, constantly moving, but this man before her was still and terse and somber in a way that almost turned her stomach. He relented after a moment though, his mouth forming the words as if each of them caused him physical pain. "I was captured," he said, "but I escaped. I made my way south. Found a village where the people were friendly. They took me in.

"And you stayed there all this time?"

"There was this girl…" his voice faded out, sorrow flickering in his eyes. Of course there was a girl, Jean thought. There always was. "Anyway. I figured there was nothing for me here. So I stayed. Until a few months ago. The village got sick. All of them. She died. I didn't figure there was much point in staying after that."

"I'm sorry," she said, reaching out on impulse to rest her left hand against his arm. His blue eyes flickered from her face down to her hand and back again.

"Nice ring," he said, and Jean snatched her hand back as if it had been burned. "Does it belong to a nice man?"

"Yes," she said, her chin lifting almost defiantly as she spoke.

But then, strangely, Tucker smiled for the first time since she'd walked outside.

"Good," he said. "That's good."

When she'd first decided to come here Jean had imagined they'd have so much to say to one another, that she'd tell him everything about the boys' childhoods, about her work with the Blakes, about Lucien. She'd tell him every detail of every minute since they parted, tell him how sorry she was for the way things had ended between them, tell him...oh, everything. But now, strangely, she found she didn't want to, or more precisely that she didn't need to. He didn't need to hear it, and she didn't need to say it. Time had done its work, and it didn't matter now, the myriad catastrophes and triumphs that had befallen them both down through the years. Telling him wouldn't change things, and nothing she could say would ever make their relationship the same as it had been before.

"I'm not staying long," Tucker said, looking away from her to gaze distantly up at the sky. "I'm going to Queensland. There's work in the mines there for them as want it."

"Are you sure?" Jean asked him. After all, they were forty-five now, and he somehow seemed older than she, old beyond his years. Mining was hard work, and he'd endured so much already; to start over in such a difficult place seemed unthinkable to Jean.

"It'll keep my hands busy," he said with a shrug. "And miners don't talk so much."

It wasn't Jean's place to object, to tell him what he ought to do with his life, and so she didn't. She only said, "Will you write to me, when you get there? Let me know you're safe?"

"'Course I will, Jean." And then he watched her closely as he said, "If your fella won't mind."

"He won't," she said, and strangely she felt the beginning of a smile forming at the corner of her mouth as she thought of Lucien. "He knows, Tucker. He knows everything. I told him. And he knows I've come here today."

"Must be an awfully relaxed sort of man," Tucker said. And stranger still, the faintest hint of a smile tugged at his lips beneath his beard.

"He understands. He was a soldier, too. Lost his family in the war."

"It's good you found each other, then."

"Yes," she was smiling in earnest now. "Yes, it is."

"I'm happy for you, Jean." He stepped up close and kissed her cheek once, quickly, before backing away a pace. "You take care of yourself, now."

Jean knew a dismissal when she'd heard one, but it didn't wound her; he was right. There was nothing more for them to say, and her heart was at peace. "Travel safe, Tucker," she said. And then she turned, and walked away, and he watched her go, and all was well.


	7. Chapter 7

Jean had not come home yet.

The sun was still shining, though it had sunk low on the horizon, and Lucien had watched its progress, telling himself that there was not cause to worry about her so long as the sun was still shining. If darkness fell and he still did not know what had become of her then he would allow himself to acknowledge his distress, but until then he would do his best to bite it back. After all, she had only gone to visit her family, to spend time with the people whose love had shaped and molded her from her earliest day; what sort of danger could possibly befall her, in such a place?

Of course it wasn't her physical safety that left him worried; it was her heart he worried for, gentle and broken so many times, that heart was dear to him, and he could not bear to see it fractured still further.

There was something horrible about it, the return of an old love. A broken heart could ache more fiercely than a broken bone, could leave a body trembling, grieving, crying out from the pain of it for years on end, and no pill could be prescribed to heal it. To have suffered such a loss, to have found the strength to carry on, to have patched up the holes in that shattered heart with hope for plaster and then to have the culprit return to the scene of the crime - horrible. The re-examination of the past such a reunion inspired would only give rise to question after question; _what if you'd never left me, what if you stay with me now, what if you were always the one I was meant to have and I stuffed up letting you go, what if I could love you better this time? _Lucien understood that all too well, for he had stood upon the doorstep and looked into the face of his wife and heard every one of those questions echoing in his mind for weeks on end. _What if I could have been a better husband, what if I tried my best to make her happy now, what about Jean? _

It had taken rather a long time for him to find the answers to those questions, but Mei Lin had helped him in the end. It didn't matter how hard he tried, how different things might have been _if only_; they were different people now, and the past was behind them. They could be kind, friendly to one another, he could even make her laugh if he tried very hard, but they did not, would not, could not ever love one another, not ever again. It had taken him a very long time to come to terms with that fact, and to realize that it wasn't a tragedy. The only way he and Mei Lin could ever find happiness again was to let one another go, and so he had, oh how his heart had grown full of joy, delighted and content with his Jean.

To know that she walked the same road now, that she would look into the face of a stranger and see the eyes of an old flame, to know that she would stand toe-to-toe with everything her life could have been and have to choose, that knowledge terrified him. For the first time he understood truly how miserable Jean must have been during the long weeks of Mei Lin's visit to Ballarat. For the first time he felt the agony of it, having to give his lover the space to make her own choices while knowing that she could very easily break his heart in the process. Such was the nature of love, he supposed; nothing could wound like love, and nothing could heal like it, and sometimes it was weapon and balm both at once, and the only way to live was to embrace it with arms wide open, come what may.

Jean had not come home yet, and to stop himself from hailing a cab and driving out to the farm to collect her himself Lucien had donned his hat and marched down to the Pig & Whistle. For the rest of his life he would wonder what had possessed him to do such a thing; the club would have been quieter, the food better, the whiskey finer, but he had not even hesitated. He had gone to the pub, knowing it would be crowded and that the noise would grate on his ears, knowing that the food would be greasy and not at all satisfactory. He had gone to the pub, and for the rest of his life a small, superstitious piece of his heart would believe he had been sent there by fate itself, that no power on earth could have stopped him from being there on this night, exactly where he was meant to be.

It was a Saturday evening, and as such the pub was full almost to bursting, but Lucien managed to muscle his way through the throng at the bar and order a pint. He exchanged a bill for a beer and then steered himself away from the pulsing crowd, looking for a place to sit.

Most of the tables were full, men standing or sitting all around them, so many chairs pushed in one place that their occupants' knees touched. Most of the tables, but not all; there was one table, in the far corner, where a single man sat with his back to the wall, the chair across from him empty. It was the quietest corner of the pub, and the only empty seat Lucien could see, and so he squared his shoulders and marched over.

The man was a stranger to him, but then most of the patrons of the pub were strangers. This man wore a heavy brown utility jacket over dungarees, heavy brown workboots on his feet, much as the same as every other man in the pub. He wore his pitch black hair cropped close, and it was strangely at odds with his bushy grey beard, as if the top half of his head did not belong with the bottom half. His eyes were sunken deep in his face, and under the dim lights overhead Lucien could not make out their color, but he understood the man's expression very well; he was watching Lucien in a way that seemed to say _stay the hell away from me._

"Mind if I sit down?" Lucien asked despite the stranger's grim visage, gesturing towards the empty chair.

For a long moment the man stared up at him in silence and Lucien began to regret his decision to join him there. Perhaps there was a very good reason this stranger was sitting by himself; perhaps everyone else in the pub knew something that Lucien did not.

"Don't see why not," the man said at last, and he kicked the empty chair, just enough to send it rocking out from under the table, not enough to send it crashing into Lucien. The gesture was welcoming, if a bit aggressive, and so Lucien settled himself down in that chair at once.

"Thank you," he said.

The stranger grunted, and then continued to drink his beer in silence.

Lucien had only wanted a place to sit. He had only wanted to spend a few minutes with his feet up, sipping his beer, watching the mayhem around him before he returned to his empty house and waited for Jean to come home at last. And yet, he had stumbled across his own little mystery here at the pub, and he did so hate to leave a mystery unsolved. Why did this man sit all by himself? Why was his hair cut so severely? Why was his coat twice as large as it needed to be, and why did he wear a coat at all on such a warm day? And why-

Another man approached their table and carefully placed a glass of whiskey down in front of the stranger.

"Welcome home, Tucker," the man said. The stranger sitting across from Lucien looked up at his benefactor for a long moment and then nodded.

"Thank you, friend," the stranger said, in a tone that was polite and appreciative but seemed to imply that he did not recognize the man who'd brought him a drink at all. The man didn't seem to mind, he nodded once and walked away, but Lucien did not pay him any mind; his eyes were locked on the stranger.

_Tucker. _

Lucien stared at the stranger, curiosity and horror within him. How had this come to pass, he wondered, that of all the places he could have gone, all the people whose tables he could have shared, he had come here and sat at this one, with the one man who occupied his thoughts? It had been a very long time since Lucien had last given any credence to the idea of God, but in that moment he found himself in a more accepting frame of mind.

The longer he looked the more he could see the resemblance to the handsome lad in the photograph Jean had shown him. The square jaw, the blue eyes, full lips tucked away beneath that bushy beard. There were wrinkles on his face, now, and sorrow in his gaze, but time brought such to most men of his age - Lucien realized with a start that this stranger was six years younger than himself, not yet fifty, though his face seemed old beyond his years. What was he doing here, sitting alone in a pub when on the outskirts of town there was a farmhouse full of people who loved him? And if Tucker was here, then where on earth was Jean?

"Tucker?" Lucien said to him then, the questions spilling out of him. "You're Tucker Beazley?"

The stranger had not touched the whiskey for the glass he held in his hand was still full of beer, and he seemed in no hurry to finish it. At the sound of Lucien's voice he frowned and then took a long sip.

"Yes," he said when he was finished, placing the glass gently on the table. "Sorry, but I don't recognize your face. Been gone a long time."

"You wouldn't," Lucien told him. "We've never met. I'm Lucien Blake."

"Doctor Blake's boy?"

At fifty-one years old Lucien felt he hardly qualified as a boy any more, but the people of this town seemed determined to disagree.

"Yes."

"I remember your old man," Tucker said. The words came out of him slowly, haltingly, as if he were not accustomed to speaking much at all. "He was a good bloke."

"Yes, he was," Lucien said. Thomas Blake had been a lot of things, and Lucien had used all sorts of less than exemplary adjectives for him down through the years, but there was no need to go into all of that now, he thought. Whatever else Thomas might have been he had been that, too, a good bloke.

_Christ_, but this was strange. To sit here with this man who had occupied his thoughts almost unceasingly for the last twenty-four hours, to hear his voice, to see for himself that this ghost from Jean's past was very much alive, a walking, talking, breathing man. This man, this stranger, had held Jean's hands, kissed her lips, had - oh, he had done so much more than that, had loved her, had loved her sons when they were small, had watched Jean grow from a child into a woman. This stranger knew things about Lucien's beloved that Lucien himself could only guess at. Not for the first time he found himself wondering what Jean had been like when she was young, how her appearance might have changed through the years, how her temperament had settled, shifted. Lucien wanted to know about it all, wanted to ask, but if Tucker was here and Jean was not then perhaps their meeting had not gone very well at all, and perhaps it would be both unkind and unwise to talk to him about it now.

And yet, Lucien could not quite find the resolve to stop himself. They shared something in common, Lucien and Tucker, the love of the same woman, and Lucien wanted this stranger to know it. But how ought he go about it? He could hardly come out and say _I'm in love with Jean, and she's told me about you and your indiscretion, and I was just wondering if you had any intention of taking her away from me. _

"You got something to say, mate?" Tucker asked him then, sharply. Lucien frowned, realizing that some of his concern must have shown on his face. He hadn't meant to be so transparent, but Tucker had seen right through him, and now he had no choice but to tell him the truth.

"I'm engaged to Jean," Lucien said simply. It was true, though she left the house without her ring more often than not, though the engagement had not yet become common knowledge. They couldn't make it so, not now, not yet, not while Lucien was still married. But when she'd kissed him good-bye that morning she had gently touched his face, and he had seen then that his ring sparkled on her finger. For whatever reason she had chosen to wear it when she left to go meet Tucker, and Lucien had taken some comfort from that fact, from knowing that she had wanted that tangible reminder of him with her when she left. He did not know whether she'd told Tucker about the engagement in so many words, but she'd been wearing that ring; surely the man would have noticed.

It was Tucker's turn to study Lucien closely, and so Lucien sat still and silent, wondering what this man saw when he looked at him. The navy suit, with its expensive cut and fine tailoring, the neat set of his hair, the sharp line of his own well-trimmed beard; it was the appearance of a doctor, and Lucien knew his clothes spoke of wealth and class. He had hated such things once, but he knew that people expected this of him, that they would trust their doctor more if he was well put-together, and he had settled into that role, comfortable at long last. They could not have been more different in appearance, Lucien and Tucker, and yet Jean had loved them both; how strange it all seemed, in that moment.

"You're a lucky man, then," Tucker said, reaching for his beer once more. "She's a fine woman."

"She is," Lucien agreed.

There was something awkward, tense, unbearable about this, sitting here with this man, so much left unsaid between them. Yes, Jean was a fine woman, a beautiful woman, a strong woman, and Tucker belonged to her past while Lucien had set his sights on her future. For the moment the two paths had converged, and there was something almost wrong about it, as if such a confluence was never meant to be, as if it went against the very laws of nature itself. But Jean had sat at the kitchen table with Mei Lin, once, and if she could endure such agony with grace then Lucien supposed she deserved the same decorum from him.

"She told me about you," Tucker said after a moment. "Said you lost your family in the war."

Lucien tried valiantly to hide his relief. If Jean had told Tucker about him, if she was somewhere else while Tucker was sitting alone in the pub, then it seemed to Lucien that odds were good she had made her choice already, and chosen _him. _There was nothing he wanted more, though he did feel a bit guilty, knowing what his victory had cost the man sitting across from him.

"I did," he said. He had lost his family, but found them again; for seventeen years he'd believed his wife and daughter dead, but now he had seen both their faces, held them close, now he knew that they lived together happy and well in Shanghai. Finding them had not erased the memory of his grief, however, and though he knew they were safe he knew, too, that there was no place for him in their lives, not any more. They were lost to him still, but this was a gentler, more subtle sort of loss. Tucker didn't need to know any of that, however, and so Lucien kept those thoughts to himself.

"She said she told you about me, but considering you haven't decked me yet I reckon you aren't too bothered about it."

_We all make mistakes, _he thought, but wisely he did not say such a thing aloud. Likely Tucker would not appreciate being referred to as a mistake. And no matter how curious Lucien might have been about this man and the secrets he held, he knew that it was not his place to demand an accounting from Tucker.

"Everyone has a story," Lucien said instead. "And the older we get, the longer the story gets. Whatever happened in the past is part of what made her who she is today. And I love her, just as she is."

Though he meant every word Lucien felt just a bit foolish saying such a thing; it was far too romantic, far too passionate, not the sort of declaration he would have made to just anyone. But he wanted Tucker to know that he loved Jean truly, deeply, that he intended to look after her and make her happy, for all the rest of her days.

"That's good, then," Tucker said. He drained his beer in one long swig, and then rose to his feet. "I think I'm going to go for a walk," he said, peering out into the long shadows of the early evening. "Jean's still at Laurie's. She looked happy when I left. And I want you to know, I'm going to Queensland. You won't see me again."

What could Lucien possibly say to that? _Thank God_ seemed a bit too crass, though a small, selfish piece of Lucien's heart was grateful to know that the ghost of Tucker Beazley would haunt them no more.

"You take care of her," he continued.

"I will," Lucien told him solemnly.

"And you can have that whiskey. On me."

Tucker flashed him a quick, easy smile and for just a moment Lucien could almost see the young man he had been, the young man Jean had taken into her arms, into her bed. He could almost see the man she'd described to him, and yet that vision was gone in a flash, replaced by the melancholy expression Tucker had worn from the moment Lucien first sat down.

"That's very kind of you," Lucien said.

And then Tucker turned and left, and Lucien watched him go, thinking about the nature of time. Every second, every step, every meeting, every parting, every loss, every moment of life seemed to change and reshape the character of a man, and no one was the same at twenty, at thirty, at fifty. To try to recapture the brilliance of the past was folly; time was a river, flowing ever onward, and no matter how a man might try he could never step into the same water twice. Even if he stood still and unmoving in the very center of the river the water rushed down stream, and everything around him would change. Lucien had learned that lesson the day Mei Lin returned to him, the day he let her go, and it seemed that Tucker Beazley had learned it now as well.


	8. Chapter 8

The light by the front door was shining brightly when Jean came home from Laurie's at last, but otherwise the house was all in darkness. She had not meant to be gone so long, but when she'd walked back into the kitchen after meeting Tucker her sisters-in-law and her nieces had swooped down upon her, and she'd found herself sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by the chatter of well-meaning women while she sipped a cup of strong tea. It had been so long, so very long, since last she'd spent time in that place, and her family was full of questions, about her boys, about the ring on her finger. Though some of them were church-goers most of them had abandoned the rigorous rituals of their youth, and there had been more joy than judgment in their exclamations. Jean had asked her fair share of questions, too, had listened to the litany of names as each woman pointed out her own children or grandchildren, had even spent some time with Bugsy's youngest grandson Jake cradled in her arms. It had been a strange, wonderful way to pass the time, cuddling an infant close and listening to the brash, uncaring conversation of her family.

Though Jean loved her life in the Blake house there was no denying that it was restrictive, in many ways. Everyone in town knew her as the doctor's housekeeper, his receptionist, and her reputation reflected back on him. She had taken pains, down through the years, to carry herself with dignity and grace. Dignity and grace did not count for anything at all in Laurie's house, and as she spoke to her family she felt her voice slipping into an old manner of speech she had not used in many a long years. It was strange, but comfortable, too, like rediscovering an old pair of shoes in the back of the closet. Even Eadie had softened somewhat - though not completely - and Jean had left that place happy and content. She was welcomed there, if she did not truly belong, and when she left she had given her word that she would not be a stranger, and she intended to keep it. Though she could never return to that life it was comforting to know that she could revisit it from time to time, that while the names and the faces and the days might change there would always be love there, waiting for her.

She hesitated for a moment in the foyer of her own home; the kitchen and sitting room were dark, and she supposed Lucien and Matthew must have already gone to bed. Though the proper thing to do would have been to go upstairs and let down her hair and ready herself for sleep Jean was too energized to lay her head down just yet; joy and hope sparked like electricity through her veins and she wanted, more than anything, to speak to Lucien.

Still feeling a bit brave, a bit reckless from her journey back to the wild world of her youth Jean turned to his bedroom door then, and knocked on it once before opening it.

Inside Lucien was lying propped up against the headboard, the lamp on his side table shining while he held a book in his hands. He looked up sharply when the door opened, but his face softened as he looked at her, and he marked his place in the book before setting it aside.

"Hello, my darling," he said then. His voice was soft and warm, his expression welcoming, nothing about his appearance or posture communicating the slightest hint of unease. He was content, here in this place with her, and Jean felt a sudden wave of love for him come crashing over her head, drowning out everything else. This day had been a tumult of emotions, a strange twisting and turning between what had been and what was now, but here in this room with him the chaos quieted, and she was left thinking only how handsome he was in the dim light of the lamp, how gentle he was, how he had never once tried to tie her down or force her into a different shape. Lucien had always, from the very first, encouraged her to be simply herself, given her credit for her achievements and a shoulder to lean on when she stumbled. The congregation of the church might look at her askance when she wore his ring on her finger, and Eadie might grumble about her putting on airs, and the rest of the family might whisper when she walked away about how strange and distant she had become, but Lucien accepted her, just as she was.

An idea had come to her, a sudden urge she was finding it difficult to ignore, and in that moment she decided it was high time she followed her heart, and stopped worrying. And so she leaned back against the door, and kicked off her shoes while simultaneously reaching up to take her off her hat, letting it float silently down to the floor. That task accomplished she crossed the room, but instead of standing beside Lucien and taking the hand he offered her she went to the other side of the bed and carefully stretched herself out alongside him, letting her head come to rest against his shoulder while she smoothed her palm across the broad plane of his chest. He still wore shirt and vest both, but he had unbuttoned his collar and she let her fingers dance across the soft skin at the base of his throat. In response Lucien curled his arm around her, his hand coming to rest on the rise of her hip, and Jean relaxed against him, closing her eyes and humming softly, happily. Surrounded by the heat of him, the smell of him, the strength of him, she felt her worries melt away, and felt happiness bloom in her chest.

"All right, my darling?" Lucien asked her in a quiet voice.

Jean hummed again, and tilted her head back so that her lips could brush against his chin.

"Yes," she said. And then she added softly, "I love you, sweetheart."

In her younger days such endearments had tripped easily from her lips. It was the way she'd grown up; almost no one was called by their proper name. Not even Tucker, whose real name was Paul - his mother had laughingly called him Tucker when he was a baby because he never stopped eating, not for a moment, and forty-six years later the name had well and truly stuck. Bugsy's name was Donald, Laurie's name was Laurence, and everyone had called Christopher _Chris. _Jack's given name was John, and Eadie's name was Edith. Every one of the great horde of children who had run through Laurie's home that afternoon had answered when a grownup called out _sweetheart, _and having been thrust back into that world of easy familiarity and demonstrative affection Jean found herself reluctant to leave it. The nicknames themselves were part of that ritual of family; only people who knew them well, only people who knew their history, could use such words with ease, and she found that she missed it. Calling Lucien _sweetheart_ now felt right, felt proper; it felt, she thought, as if she were laying claim to him, as if she were saying _he is mine, and I love him, _and she wanted to proclaim that truth from the rooftops.

"And I love you, my darling," he answered, and she grinned, wide and proud. Lucien had been the first to start this game between them, had begun to call her _darling_ while they were still in Adelaide, and she loved to hear the word from his lips.

"I met Tucker today," he told her, and Jean sat up suddenly, wondering whether or not she ought to be worried. But as she looked at him Lucien only smiled, and Jean supposed that must mean that everything was all right. "He seemed like a nice man."

"He is," she thought, thinking how strange it was that she and Lucien could so openly discuss this man from her past, this man who represented one of her greatest mistakes, with no despair or animosity between them.

"Are you glad that you saw him?"

It was a question asked in all sincerity, and so Jean took a moment to ponder her answer. She owed Lucien the truth in this, as in all things, and if the last twenty-four hours had taught her anything it was that she loved him, with all her heart, that she could trust him with everything she had.

"Yes," she said. "I think I needed the chance to see that he's all right, and...oh, I don't know how to explain it, Lucien, but I'm more certain than ever that we're doing the right thing." Her left hand was still pressed against his chest, and the little diamonds in her ring sparkled in the soft light. Lucien reached out and caught that hand in his own, lifted it to his lips and pressed a kiss against her palm.

"You don't have to explain anything," he said. "I'm glad you're happy."

What a dear man he was, and _oh, _how she loved him. Not for the first time her thoughts traveled back to those terrible weeks when Mei Lin had been with them, when Jean had watched from the shadows as Lucien danced around his wife, when her own heart had shattered at the thought that what she wanted could never be. In those days Jean had not understood much of anything, had been almost overwhelmed by grief at what she thought must surely spell the end of her dreams. But it hadn't, of course it hadn't; Mei Lin had left, and the moment she was gone Lucien had proposed to Jean in earnest. In the early days of their engagement Jean had often looked down at her ring and wondered if she were doing the right thing, or if she were being selfish, if by taking Lucien's hand she was trying to lay claim to something that did not belong to her. Sitting beside him now, however, Jean realized just how wrong she had been. They did not belong to their pasts; they belonged only to one another.

"You make me happy, sweetheart," she told him, and then she leaned forward and kissed him softly.

That night Jean did not return to her own bed; she stayed right where she was, wrapped in Lucien's arms, and when she woke in the morning, naked and bearing the mark of Lucien's lips against the curve of her neck, she had only smiled, and given thanks for the many trials that had led her to this point. Life is a journey, someone had told her once, and she could not wait to see what lay in store for her.


End file.
